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Musical intervals (Western music) This page is part of www.amarilli.co.uk by Brian Capleton
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You will need Windows media player installed, or something else that can play mp3 files! Broadband is recommended
Some people who have never come across the terms "high" and "low" applied to musical "pitch", have different ideas about what the terms might mean. (Music workshops with young children typically prove this point). The following examples should banish doubt about what "high" and "low" means, applied to musical pitch.
Here is tone that sweeps from a low pitch to a high pitch...
Here is tone that sweeps from a high pitch to a low pitch...
And here are some piano tones getting higher in pitch...
This piano tone...
has a higher pitch than this one...
The difference in musical pitch between any two notes, is said to be the musical interval between them.
In most Western music today, the smallest musical interval played on musical instruments, is the semitone. Click on the numbers below to hear some piano tones. The musical interval or pitch difference between any two adjacent numbers is a semitone.
Two semitones equal a whole tone or simply, a tone. The musical interval from any note, to another note two steps away in the series, such as 5 and 7, or 3 and 5, is a tone.
Notice that if we play 1,3,5,6,8,9,10,12,13 - the numbers highlighted below in pink, we get the familiar major scale of Western music. Try it by clicking on the numbers from left to right.
Look at the pattern that produces this scale. The musical intervals between the highlighted notes of the scale, from left to right, are tone, tone, semitone, tone, tone, tone, semitone.
If we wanted to put all the notes in this major scale together, side by side, and push the intervening notes upwards on the page, we would get the following arrangement...
which is how we arrive at the standard keyboard pattern of notes, as on a piano. The notes numbered in pink become the white notes or naturals of a piano keyboard, and the notes in between them become the black (raised ) notes called sharps or accidentals.
Notice the extra black note on the right of the 13th note. This is because note 13 also becomes the first note of the same sequence starting all over again, if we were to continue adding notes to the right. The musical interval between note 1 and note 13 is an octave. Note 13 is 12 semitones higher than note 1. Any two notes 12 semitones apart are separated by the musical interval of an octave.
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